From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Realis moods (abbreviatedreal) are
a category of grammatical moods which indicate that
something is actually the case (or actually not the case); in other
words, the state of which is known. The most common realis mood is
the indicative mood, or declarative mood.

Contents

Indicative

The indicative mood or evidential
mood (abbreviatedind) is
used for factual statements and positive beliefs. All intentions
that a particular language does not categorize as another mood are
classified as indicative. It is the most commonly used mood and is
found in all languages. Example: "Paul is eating an apple" or "John
eats apples".

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English
indicative

History

The indicative suffixes in Old, Middle, and Modern English
regular verbs[1]

Present tense

Past tense

Singular

Plural

Singular

Plural

First person

Second person

Third person

First & third person

Second person

Old English

-e

-st

-eþ

-aþ

-d-e

-e-st

-d-on

Middle English

-e, -ø

-st

-th, -s

-e(n)

-d(e)

-d-st

-d-e(n)

Early Modern English

-ø

-st

-s, -th

-ø

-d

-d-st

-d

Modern English

-ø

-ø

-s

-ø

-d

-d

-d

Modern
English

The indicative mood is for statements of actuality or strong
probability:

The spine-tailed swift flies faster than any other bird in
the world.

The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers rose to record heights
in 1993.

Midwesterners will remember the flooding for many years to
come.

One may use do, does, or did with the indicative for
emphasis.

Indicative Mood

Present indicative: Jerry Seinfeld laughs on television.

Past indicative: Jerry laughed on television.

Future indicative: Jerry will laugh on television
tomorrow.

Declarative

The declarative mood (abbreviateddec)
indicates that the statement is true, without any qualifications
being made. It is in many languages equivalent to the indicative
mood, although sometimes distinctions between them are drawn. It is
closely related with the inferential mood.

Energetic

Found in Classical Arabic and various other Semitic
languages, the energetic mood expresses
something which is strongly believed or which the speaker wishes to
emphasize, e.g. yaktubanna يَكتُبُنَّ ("he certainly
writes").

Generic

The generic mood is used to generalize about a
particular class of things, e.g. in "Rabbits are fast",
one is speaking about rabbits in general, rather than
about particular fast rabbits. English has no means of morphologically distinguishing
generic mood from indicative mood; however, the distinction can
easily be understood in context by surrounding words. Compare, for
example: rabbits are fast, versus, those rabbits are
fast. Use of the demonstrative
pronounthose implies specific, particular rabbits,
whereas omitting it implies the generic mood simply by default.

Ancient Greek
had a kind of generic mood, the so-called gnomic tense,
marked by the aorist
indicative (normally reserved for statements about the past). It
was used especially to express philosophical truths about the
world.

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